


And have for a grave, instead of a grave

by Alona



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-19 11:55:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17001192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alona/pseuds/Alona
Summary: One clear morning Jan Kilbride packed light, didn't look back, and with an empty heart went to save the world.





	And have for a grave, instead of a grave

The young man let his pen drop to the table. It rolled a little ways, then came to a stop. He swept the room with slow arcs of his wide-eyed gaze, one of his hands grasping the opposite wrist in a white-knuckled grip. When he noticed what he was doing, he let go and laid both hands on the table. For all that, from his expression he might have been nothing more than curious – it was the rapid rise and fall of his shoulders that gave him away, and the trembling of his nostrils. Gertrude could not hear his breathing from behind the glass, but the visual symptoms of hyperventilation were as clear as if exaggerated for a silent film. 

She composed her expression into mild concern and went in. "You've stopped writing," she observed. 

Jan Kilbride looked at his statement, then up at Gertrude. "I..." he started, then took one slow, controlled breath and went on firmly: "There's something here. Isn't there?"

"Yes, there is," Gertrude answered, brisk and clear. This one, she could not help but know, would want to be treated as an adult – as an equal. She would humor him, as far as that went. 

He was an ordinary, pleasant-looking young man, with soft and unremarkable features, all save for his eyes, which were arrestingly deep and sky blue. It might have been fancy, but Gertrude thought his eyes had not looked so strikingly blue in the photographs taken before the _Daedalus_ mission. His build was bulky enough that the loss of weight and muscle mass weren't obvious; the only other notable difference from the grinning, confident pre- _Daedalus_ Kilbride were the signs of sleeplessness in his face. Perhaps it was only the dark half-circles under his eyes that made them look so deep and blue, and not what those eyes had seen. 

He neither moved nor answered. He seemed not even to have heard her answer. 

"Well, don't let it interfere with giving your statement," she added. 

Kilbride shook his head. "That isn't it. There – there's nothing else. The rest – I don't remember." 

His composure was hanging by a thread, and a little push would undo his reticence entirely. There was more, that was evident from the defensiveness in his voice, but what he had already given up was enough; the Eye was appeased. It would have to be enough. Gertrude would shortly be asking far more of Jan Kilbride. 

"I wonder if you've ever had much interest in traveling to the States," she remarked. 

"What?" He was staring at her as if trying to glimpse the meaning behind her words, or perhaps it was only that he was always looking at something beyond her. "What is this?"

Gertrude nodded. "Very well. Time to try something else. Do you have family in this country, Mr. Kilbride?"

"Some cousins," he answered readily. "We aren't close, though. I haven't been in contact with my parents for years. They... There's no one to miss me, really, if – " He brought himself up short. There was no mistaking the emotion now, the hitch in his breath foretelling tears. Fear, neither pure nor simple, but overmastering and breaking its banks at last. In a whisper he asked, "What are you going to do to me?" 

Gertrude took a seat across from him and absently slid his statement towards her across the table as she waited for him to back away from the edge. She had time. She had sent the assistants away early, even Michael, who had gone insisting all the way that she shouldn't work such long hours, not all alone down in the Archives, it couldn't be good for anyone, much less... There was one with whom there could never be even the pretense of being equals. 

After a while, she began. "I can see that I shall have to tell you all about it. I'll start at the beginning." 

 

"You're an adult," she had said, and, "You'll want to hear the truth," and, "You may ask any questions you have." And later, "You understand that this is much bigger than you or me. You would not be in your present line of work if you weren't prepared to take risks in the name of something greater than yourself." And, finally, when she had come back into the room after giving him some time to pull himself together, she had said, "We have weeks or perhaps months, but no more. You will want to get your affairs in order. I advise you to keep away from strangers. Your friends are probably unsafe as well. And try not to contact me except in the event of an emergency. I'll call you." She'd said this last bit with a particular dry intonation that he'd already learned to recognize as Gertrude Robinson attempting to make a joke. He hadn't laughed. 

After that one question about his family, she hadn't asked him anything. She had just explained. Answered his questions, when he'd been able to focus on her – on any of it – long enough to come up with any. Some of the answers had been evasive. She'd had nothing helpful to say when he'd asked why, after weeks of radio silence, his contact at the Stratosphere Group had reached out only to suggest that if he had something he wanted to get off his chest about the mission, he could do worse than drop in at the Magnus Institute. "They're very good listeners of over there." He was surrounded by would-be jokers. In retrospect, perhaps Gertrude hadn't answered because it was hopelessly obvious. 

Jan had gone out of having nothing else to do. He had been paid well enough that it would be some time before he needed to find work, and he hadn't started looking or even thinking about looking. He hadn't been doing much – reading the odd technical journal, though it was hard to focus, and trying to readjust to earth's gravity, but more than anything he'd been catching himself drifting off, again and again. 

He'd been sleeping better since returning to earth, or anyway he'd thought so – it was just as likely he'd only been losing time. Perhaps that idea should have bothered him more, but it didn't. More troublesome were his repeated attempts to reconstruct the end of the mission. There had been no official account published yet, so all he had to go on was what Manuela had said at their brief last meeting. He felt that he could remember, if he tried – the medical alert from Chilcott's part of the station, his own supposed heroics when the door mechanism failed to work as intended, reentry, being checked out by doctors on the ground – perhaps he really did remember all that, but the dread was always with him that he had only willed himself into believing he remembered – taken Manuela's account and dressed it up with assumptions and fabrications and gone through it again and again, like hearing a story about yourself as a baby and imagining it until you became convinced that your memories were of the thing itself, and not of the story. 

And always, always, whatever he did, whatever he tried to think about, a part of him ached as though he was still out there in the nothing of space, facing down that being too vast to have any conception of his existence, smaller than an ant facing down a skyscraper. He had suspected – no, at the deepest level of his being he had accepted – that in all likelihood he was still out there, that everything he thought had happened since, all the tenuous reality he had smoothed into verisimilitude, was only the random firing of his brain as it starved for oxygen, dilating a single moment into a sham lifetime. 

By the time he had shown up at the Magnus Institute and met Gertrude Robinson, he had simply been waiting for it to stop. 

She had asked for his statement, and it had flowed out of him, the terror he had been living with taking shape, imperfectly but with an eloquence he hadn't suspected himself of possessing – and then he had come to that moment, the last one he was sure of, the one he had never left, and the words had dried up and he had stopped. 

That was when he'd felt it. 

A flicker, that was all, barely even a feeling. In the space between letting his pen drop and hearing it fall, he had sensed – something. Something had been in the room with him, and it had been watching. 

The feeling had gone almost before he could name it, but it had left an ever-widening wake of wariness and paranoia that was still with him months later, a marble of irritation rattling around the hollows of his soul. Whatever it was, it seemed very small indeed beside the terror that made up so much of what he was now. 

Another thing Gertrude hadn't asked was whether he would do it. Looking back, she had taken it for granted that he would, and he had let that pitiless confidence guide him. She must have expected that. Certainly she had presented no arguments, which perhaps had been the best argument of all. Jan might have chucked it, if she'd told him it was his responsibility to humanity, anything futile of that nature. Instead she had just explained why he was needed. 

He was an adult, and he had wanted to hear the truth, at least until she had told him, but by then it had been much too late. To be a part of something greater than himself – it wasn't why he had wanted to go to space, but he could feel a dumb longing for it now, alongside the fear. 

He had no affairs to settle that had not been taken care of before the mission. There were no strangers he wished to meet, no friends he had not already been avoiding. Gertrude might as well have left her parting advice unsaid. He had not once felt the urge to call her. He only waited. 

And then one clear morning, she called him and told him to meet her at the airport, and Jan Kilbride packed light, didn't look back, and with an empty heart went to save the world. 

 

"I've had a lot of time to think about it." 

The tone was deceptively mild. Gertrude had been right in deciding to drive.

"I hope you haven't changed your mind. It's late to be backing out." 

"I know," Jan said. He was looking out the window, so she only saw the back of his head. "That's one of the things I've been thinking about. Did you do this to me deliberately? Send me up there – based on whatever Mr. Fairchild saw in my psych profile? Dangle me like bait for that – that – " He paused, took a deep breath to compose himself and rein in the emotion that had crept into his voice. "All that so you could use me to plug some hole in the world and keep a different monster from coming out. Isn't that right?" 

"That's a picturesque summary, and it was more of a convenient side effect of Fairchild's own schemes – but you aren't altogether wrong," Gertrude said. "Now that you know... How do you feel about it?" 

It had been a long flight, and it was going to be a long drive. The night no doubt would be long, too. Jan _wanted_ to talk about it. And dreams would be the least of his worries where he was going. 

There was a beat of silence in the car. 

"How do – how do I feel? About my dream of going to space being used against me? About being turned inside out – being invaded by a terror I can never fully process or explain – so I could become a tool to stop an apocalypse I don't even care about? How do I feel about you telling me there's nothing left but to let myself become a human sacrifice? About you as good as saying I'm being childish or, here's a good one, self-involved if I think of refusing? You're not really worried about me backing out. You never were."

He was speaking quickly but quietly, facing forward now, watching as the road pitched down a steep incline. 

"I know – you never said sacrifice. A risk, you called it, to become part of something greater than myself. Some existential war of yours, your life purpose, all that – I wish I could believe it really was as great as you think it is. I know you're only deluding yourself, but I'd like to believe it. I would. You thought I'd leap at the chance, after – after what's been done to me, the mere possibility of belonging to something bigger, of becoming something bigger. How do I _feel_? Like I have no choice and never did. Like I should be happy, but instead I'm afraid. I feel – excited, in a horrible way. Like this is the only way I can have a chance of feeling normal again. And I feel like I should make you stop this car, get out and run until I'm somewhere you can't reach me. And – I won't. I can't. Because I feel – I know I'm going where I belong. There. Is that what you wanted to know?" 

He turned towards her at last, scrubbing the tears from his face hurriedly, as if he had just noticed them. 

Gertrude brought the car to a smooth stop by the side of the road and gave Jan a long, cool look and wondered whether he understood more than she had told him, and how much. "Yes," she said, "it is. If you'd like to get out now – to stretch your legs or anything like that – this is your last chance." 

He met her gaze with eyes that were all the bluer for crying, and he nodded and said, "I'm all right. Go on." 

She did. 

He only spoke once more, when the mile markers for Bucoda had dwindled to low single digits. He'd tried to cover it up, but he had been weeping on and off since his outburst. He had also increasingly been shifting in his seat, squaring his shoulders as if adjusting for the drag of a weight he felt growing heavier and heavier. 

"I think I've dreamt about it," he said. "I've been dreaming a lot, though I can't always... They bleed into each other. I don't think they're real dreams, not like... You've just got inside my head. I dream there's a moment when my ears pop and everything falls back into perfect perspective and nothing is wrong anymore... It's the worst dream of all. I hate it. I'm..." There was a silence so long she thought he had finished, and then he said: "Do you think I'll survive?"

Gertrude did not respond. The only answer she could have given him – that he would be better off if he did not survive – must have occurred to him already, long before this. 

"Yeah, all right," he said. And he turned his eyes up to the car ceiling with a distant look in them and an expression on his face that someone more religiously minded than Gertrude might have mistaken for sublime resignation. He did not speak again, not even when they came within sight of the pit, and not even when Gertrude stopped the car beside it.


End file.
